Is your brand propelling you forwards or holding you back?

11th July 2019

Have you left it too long? Is your brand holding you back, when it should be propelling you forwards?

We work on a lot of rebrands at Milestone, and there’s one thing we always hear – “We should have done this years ago.”

Rebranding is rarely as painful as you’d think, and the rewards can be incredible. So, if you’re pondering the idea of a rebrand, here’s our top 20 clues that it might be time:

  1. When you look around your business you see a mish-mash of signage from different design eras.
  2. You have a core brand colour that no-one seems to like, or use.
  3. Everyone in sales has freestyled their own version of the PowerPoint template, full of images and clip art they found on Google.
  4. Some employees have dropped the company logo from their email footers and replaced it with a load of jumbled industry awards and confusing business partner logos.
  5. Your car park is full of brand new BMWs and Audis but the big logo on the wall above them looks like it was designed and installed in 1982.
  6. Your employees use a different name for the business than customers.
  7. You don’t recognise your own social media posts.
  8. You’ve got seven straplines.
  9. Your brand guidelines features a fax header template.
  10. Customers refer to your packaging as ‘classic’.
  11. There’s a back office store room full of boxes of glossy A4 brochures.
  12. For new employees there’s an induction process that includes the same seven core values they had at their last company.
  13. Your corporate video is nine and a half minutes long.
  14. You have five websites all talking to the same audience.
  15. Your logo features an icon but no-one can remember what it’s supposed to mean.
  16. When you see that icon reproduced at a really small size on your smart phone, it just looks like a blob.
  17. You have a corporate font that was fashionable and cutting-edge. In 1994.
  18. Your business is part of a group of companies that all work together. But customers would never know that.
  19. You have a new wave of competitors that seem to have popped-up overnight. They do exactly what you do but call it something much more exciting.
  20. Your brand is famous for something. But you’d rather it was famous for something new.

Of course, we all know examples of businesses that survive and even thrive despite poor branding. Sometimes that’s because they have no competition, or they compensate with additional sales effort or reduced pricing. But, how much better could they do? Rubbish branding is simply not an effective strategy for success. Maybe it’s time to take a brave step forward before the competition does.

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